Arch Linux

dmwdp001

Member

Registered: 2008-12-07

Posts: 5

nvidia driver install error [solved]

I'm installing arch64 on a new Core2Quad home-built computer with a GeForce 9800GT GPU.  I had previously installed 32-bit arch on the system but found the 180.22 drivers in [extra] to be very unstable with this very new card.  I turned on the [testing] repo to try the newer drivers and found them to work much, much better.
I decided to install arch 64 now rather than latter so I won't have to back up my home directory when I upgrade the system.  This time I'm trying to install the 180.29 drivers from [testing] manually via ABS. The nvidia-utils package installed fine, but the nvidia package give an error:

*** Unable to determine the target kernel version. ***
make: *** [select_makefile] Error 1

Dose anyone know how to handle the error, or ideally how to get pacman to install just that package from [testing] with out installing all the others?

Last edited by dmwdp001 (2009-03-04 19:03:17)

dmwdp001

Member

Registered: 2008-12-07

Posts: 5

Re: nvidia driver install error [solved]

OK I just solved it myself.  I read the pacman man page and found that if I put the testing repo at the bottom of pacman.conf I could just specify the repo for pacman to install the drivers from without installing all the rest .  This is a handy trick, but it isn't in the wiki at all (as far as I've seen) I think I might contribute this to the wiki.